IBM will continue to sell the two products separately.

An avian flu mashup that matches bird types and wind types that shows bird movement patterns.

(Credit:
IBM) The company on Tuesday announced IBM Mashup Center, which combines a front-end tool for end-users and a server for gathering information. A beta starts on April 15.

Mashup Center is made up of Lotus Mashups, which lets people combine information from different Web sites and present them on a single screen, and also includes IBM InfoSphere MashupHub, a lightweight tool aimed at IT professionals for preparing data feeds from different sources.

IBM is mashing up its mashups to create a product line aimed at business people who want to make Web applications fast.

The products originally came out of IBM’s emerging technologies group, which started exploring the idea of giving end-users more power to make lightweight and short-lived applications.

Two organizations, Internet2 and National LambdaRail, will contribute bandwidth to GENI as well.

The funding comes from the National Science Foundation, and it’s in the form of a three-year grant that will span about $4 million per year. More specifically, it’s for GENI’s “design and risk-reduction prototyping,” and will involve contracting 29 university research teams. The Internet has been around for quite some time, GENI’s team argues, and new developments in technology could be carried out more smoothly with a whole new infrastructure.

It might sound very Noah’s Ark, but this is not a joke: $12 million in government funding, as well as bandwidth from two research hubs, has been awarded to the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), a project from BBN Technologies that literally wants to rebuild the whole Internet.

It could easily have gone differently. Fifteen years ago, the management of the CERN physics lab in Geneva could have decided that this World Wide Web thing that researcher Tim Berners-Lee was working on might have some proprietary value down the road and put it under lock, key and license. But they didn’t. Fifteen years ago today, they put it into the public domain and changed history. Of the many Web milestones we celebrate, that makes this one special.

This blog post at SiliconValley.com from yesterday sums up the situation nicely:

Fifteen years ago yesterday, the World Wide Web became official and was put into the public domain. In honor of that fact, one of our colleagues at frog (thanks Ben Tomassetti!) brought in a birthday cake for it today:

(Credit:
Cary Gibaldi) Note the nerd humor with the binary numbering of the years… I can’t say that it actually was the “moistest cake I’ve ever tasted”, but, like the web, it was free, so I’m not going to complain.

The CERN directors took some convincing. “The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the Web was going to be,” Berners-Lee’s colleague Robert Cailliau told the BBC. “We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore CERN couldn’t hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away. We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favor of that.”

What policies need to be put in place to promote these new technologies?

Heywood: Our recommendation was that these changes need to be incentivized in some way. Now we’ve put in some strict CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards that are going to force the industry to move as rapidly as they can and improve the fuel consumption of their vehicles. Those targets are surprisingly aggressive–they’re not as easy to realize as the broader public imagines.

If it’s a couple of thousand dollars extra to share the energy between petroleum and electricity, that’s likely to be an attractive proposition. If it’s $5,000 extra, then that’s not as good, and if it’s more than that, that’s fairly worse.

Do you get the feeling that there’s a real push among at least a significant portion of consumers for more fuel-efficient cars? I’m not sure if people are willing to give up big cars necessarily, but do you get the sense that consumers and the industry are committed to more efficient technologies?
Heywood: Well, everybody wants it. The challenge is it doesn’t come free. I have lots of discussions with friends and the broader public, and they ask, why don’t cars get 50 miles per gallon? Well, you can have 50-mile-per-gallon cars, but they don’t look like the cars that most people have been buying over the last few years, for example, because the bigger, the heavier, the more fuel it’s going to consume to drive in the way that we want to drive. So there’s sort of constrained opportunities, and that’s what we have trouble relating to.

When we look at the numbers from a couple of years ago when legislation was written setting some very ambitious targets, we’re really not going to beat those targets on that time frame. Now, that’s not to say that biofuels won’t develop, and I think they will play a useful role overtime–they’re one of the few options, real options that we’ve got. But we’ve got to be very careful about the environmental impacts and unintended economic impacts of how we go about it.

Someone would come back and say if you put more taxes on gasoline consumption it’s people who are hurting economically who will be further disadvantaged. What’s the response to that?

Heywood: One can recycle some of that back to the tax system if one takes an appropriate but thoughtful view of this issue that you’ve raised.

Heywood, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues took the proverbial big-picture view of transportation in a recent report on how the U.S. could slash gasoline usage by 2035.

MIT’s report concludes there’s great potential for transportation technology. If lightweight hybrids and plug-in hybrids, for example, were the primary vehicle by 2035, the U.S. fleet would use about half the fuel it currently uses, helping significantly lower greenhouse gas levels.

I’m not saying I know the answer, but I think our strong point is that there are significant opportunities but they need incentivizing. If you want to take the last 25 years, there has been better technology in U.S. vehicles. Performance of vehicles has escalated enormously. Size and weight have gone up significantly and fuel consumption stayed roughly constant. Now, you can say, that’s because gasoline was cheap. Fair enough, but if we just rely on “the market,” the last 20 years of the market hasn’t helped this.

(Credit:
MIT)

John Heywood, MIT professor and transportation technology expert

So do you think this national goal of getting one third of our liquid fuel needs provided by biofuels by mid-century is too high?

Heywood: Well, I’m not going to say no because if you go mid-century that’s a long ways away. I think in a nearer-term sense–say going out 25 years instead of 40 to 50 years, 20 percent, maybe 25 percent (from biofuels) that may well develop. Not guaranteed, but I think that looks plausible and maybe it can go beyond that, particularly if you think of this developing in a global sense.

There has been a dispute whether plug-in hybrids are a technology that will scale. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla says that because they’re too expensive, they’ll never be used in large numbers outside of rich countries. What’s your view on the roles of plug-in hybrids?

Heywood: Well, he’s got a valid point. The batteries as we currently see them–even allowing for some development–are going to be expensive. In a plug-in hybrid you need a lot more battery so the incremental cost of that battery, which will depend on the electric range which you want, is going to be significant.

I think that there are a number of reasons why over time this country needs a transition to taxing energy consumption in useful ways that motivate people to be more efficient in the technologies that they buy and then how they use these technologies.

(Credit:
MIT)

Your report said that biofuels would play a smaller role than anticipated. Why did you find that?

Heywood: Land availability is a constraint. How rapidly can we build (biofuels production) up? Can we distribute these alternative fuels so that we could use them?

Depending on the cost of fuels that may well pay for itself over the life of the vehicle, but will that be 15 years from now, 20 years from now? We’ll be doing that kind of economic calculation much more carefully than we’re doing it today at the individual vehicle level.

This is going to be a hell of a problem to sort out and really make progress on, particularly if you look to what reductions in greenhouse gases people are looking for by mid-century. I mean those are very, very aggressive and ambitious targets (and) they may well be necessary. So there’s lots of action in the near-term and the midterm and we really need some good ideas for the long-term.

I also think that a fee and rebate system (where consumers get a rebate for buying an efficient car) at the time of purchase motivates vehicle purchasers to pay attention to the fuel economy.

Q: It seems the big conclusion from your report is that there are multiple pathways to cleaner transportation but it’s not necessarily going to be easy to improve efficiency?
Heywood: You’re right, there are a number of options. They haven’t happened already because they cost extra to improve the efficiency of vehicles. And in a sense, the bigger the improvement the more the cost–does it pay off? Issues like this have slowed down our progress in the past.

But it’s harder than we think it is to realize on these opportunities and particularly to realize on them in a very broad way, to make the nation’s fuel consumption go down. The fleet is growing all the time because the population is growing. So, I think we’ve got to work very hard to try and incentivize the steps that we have outlined and others have outlined.

Looking at all the constrained opportunities, which one seems like the easiest path to go down–just improving existing engines versus plug-in hybrids versus clean diesel, etc.?
Heywood: We’re seeing evidence right now as petroleum prices have gone way up over the last six months to a year. We’ve seen that what the buying public is doing is shifting down the size spectrum. So the really big vehicles, the sales are down significantly. At the small end with smaller vehicles, the demand is up significantly. There’s a long waiting list for the limited number of hybrids that are now available. So that will start to pull bigger numbers for existing hybrid vehicles and pull new hybrid models into the market. The auto companies are scrambling to both improve standard engine transmissions and also to develop some of these alternatives that are significantly more efficient.

CNET News spoke to Heywood about the best transportation options for consumers and the country. For individuals, he says, our choices matter–buy fuel-efficient cars and don’t drive aggressively if you’d like to clean up your ride.

If you do tax fuels, it’s a revenue source for improving our roadway infrastructure, which is in strong need of reversing the downward slide in terms of its deterioration. And then (that would pay for) even providing some additional aspects to the infrastructure that would improve its capability of having people move with less congestion and save energy that way.

Then there are some behavioral issues that are sometimes built into the system: We all like cars that are more fun to drive. More fun gets translated into more powerful (heavier) cars, so the market pulls ever-more powerful cars. The industry competes on providing the next car that’s more powerful than the last one. That’s been very detrimental to using better technology to directly reduce fuel consumption.

Meanwhile, smaller cars would go a long way to efficiency but automakers tend to build bigger and bigger cars, responding to consumer demand.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles remain the elusive prize–technically elegant yet stubbornly hard to make commercial and environmentally sustainable.

How do you think hydrogen vehicles will evolve? Will they be a niche market?

Heywood: Fuel cells though are very different (from hybrids) and they’re going to need a brand-new fuel infrastructure–hydrogen–and it’s not easy to put that in. So I don’t think they’re a niche market. They will get out in some limited fleet testing. But whether it starts to take off in a serious way towards big time depends a lot on whether we see good ways to produce hydrogen that fit our future energy strategies much better. There are lots of questions, people working hard on these questions, but it’s going to hover at the modest level for quite awhile before we get a sense of whether this is ready for big time.

Looking at the pace of technology development and the market “pull” of consumers, the report tries to sort out dead ends from more promising routes.

So lots of things can happen at different time scales–and then very long-term ideas like plug-in hybrids where we share the energy used for driving with electricity. And, of course, the hydrogen economy is being worked on seriously, but its implementation is still some ways away.

Battery-powered
cars aren’t the only route to reinventing cars. Biofuels are touted as a gasoline replacement but are coming under more fire for financial and environmental reasons.

To get under the hood of transportation technology, just talk to John Heywood.

But when it comes to big changes in transportation, he says that policies that encourage consumers to buy “green” are the only way to truly transform the nation’s fleet.

You’ve been advocating for better fuel economy and less polluting vehicles for quite some time. What’s your level of optimism right now?

Heywood: Well, I think we are going in the right direction. This period where the prices of oil is high–and I think it may go down some, but it’s not going to go down to pretty high levels–that will continue to motivate people to shift what they do.

I just happen to have gone through some car buying lately. It’s really hard to hang onto your toughness. When you look at all the other things that matter about a car and the other things that we like about cars, it is really hard to hang onto the more stringent stuff that is indeed going to matter. But it gets pushed into the background a bit at time of sale.

There’s also a weight reduction from the vehicle by substituting lighter materials. The more use of aluminum instead of steel or high-strength steel instead of standard steel, you get some useful weight reductions. That takes a bit longer because it’s got to be designed into the vehicles.

An MIT study lays out which technologies have the potential to be the most fuel efficient.

commentary

Come out to Utah to ski and store up some pie calories to get you through the day. Or just eat pie. You can always burn them in some other fashion. Like in writing open-source software.

The result? Bliss.

Matt Asay's Coconut Cream Pie

Rangaswami’s vision explains why his company plunked down $105 million to acquire Ribbit this week. (see Techmeme). Ribbit’s software allows developers to integrate voice features to Web applications, such as Salesforce.com, Facebook, and the
iPhone. In the coming weeks, BT will integrate Ribbit with its 21CN network, which is available in more than 120 countries.

“The telcos have lost control of the device. When you start building genuinely agnostic services, when you don’t know the target device, it requires a different form creativity,” he said. It’s a move from closed networks to more open software platforms, and part of BT’s transformation from a telco to a platform-based, software-driven services company. “Everything we do at BT is embeddable as workflow for customers. Voice is a feature embedded in the workflow,” he added.

The 21CN plan included a platform that allowed developers to embed voice into Internet applications. That platform still exists, but one wonders if anyone is using it. So perhaps they had to go out and buy what is essentially a Class Five switch with a pretty Internet interface.

GigaOm’s Om Malik likes the vision, but is skeptical about BT’s ability to execute.

“The value only comes if you have applications that are used in an all-IP environment, and you can deploy services at the touch of a button rather than fiddling around with jumpers and cables. Ribbit is Silicon Valley’s first phone company where you fiddle with software, not cables,” Rangaswami said. “The story is not about cost reduction per se or telling customers what they must do to change or a backplane move. It’s about innovation. The primitives of the network are exposed.”

He is depending on what he called the “magic of the community” to “see things we cannot” and innovate with BT’s development platform and network. “We have become background catalysts, building better tools for the channel and developers,” he added.

JP Rangaswami

As Malik implies, Rangaswami’s next challenge will be getting the developer community to adopt his voice-as-a-feature-at-the-edge-of-the-network approach. It won’t be difficult to convince people that voice features, like social networking, should be available to any Web site or application. Competing against Google’s forthcoming Android, the iPhone, and other developer platforms will be trickier. As Rangaswami said in a video about the deal, “Execution is the name of the game now.”

The fact that Ribbit is located in the midst of Silicon Valley, and a hotbed of developers, was also a factor in BT’s decision to buy the company.

Ribbit Applications

(Credit: David Sifry)
JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT (British Telecommunications plc), has a vision for the future of the telephony industry.

Ribbit, as an independent company was able to get some–not a lot–of developer interest. I am not sure how BT is going to do that. It is after a telecom operator, who wants to operate like an Internet company. Sure, in a circus you can make a dog walk on two legs as well.

Beyond handsets, cellular carriers play a crucial role in whether a location-based mobile service can take off. Loopt, a mobile social-networking site that relies on location awareness, is still only available on Sprint Nextel and its Boost Mobile subsidiary. Buddy Beacon, a similar service launched by mobile virtual network operator Helio, is available exclusively to the carrier’s subscribers. To whittle it down even more, such applications are only available on compatible handsets.

There’s a reason why no mobile social-networking company has broken out yet. They haven’t found themselves–on a map, that is.

Yahoo demonstrated OneConnect at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Right off the bat, there’s the gadget factor: A whole lot of people are using cell phones that can’t handle geotagging or “proximity alerts,” and they aren’t going to upgrade anytime soon. Those of us living in New York or the San Francisco Bay Area can easily forget that not everyone has a BlackBerry or an iPhone. Not everyone has a data plan, a built-in camera, or an unlimited text-message plan–let alone GPS capabilities. Plenty of people don’t use their cell phones for anything other than boring old phone calls.

But don’t hold your breath. Location awareness is going to make huge strides in how mobile devices are used, but it’s not going to be a quick revolution. Services like Yahoo OneConnect, though brimming with hype, face both technological and psychological barriers that have kept their progress slow and will keep any company, start-up or conglomerate, from making an immediate splash in the space.

This could be a disappointment to those digital socialites drooling at the prospect of interactive maps that chart out exactly where their friends are at a given moment. But on the bright side, this means it’ll probably be awhile before your boss is using a BlackBerry to learn exactly where you went on your lunch break.

There’s a “lack of ability all around,” said John Poisson, founder and CEO of mobile photo-sharing start-up Radar.net. “If you’re talking about location-based services that are social in nature, you’ve completely broken the model because you can’t do anything social with just a subset of an audience.”

Socialight, which Sharon co-founded with Dan Melinger, has started to roll out location-aware features, but the start-up has stopped short of the Buddy Beacon route and currently only plans to use location as a way to show you which bars, restaurants, and other attractions (as tagged and annotated by fellow users), are nearby. Helio has launched a similar service and plans to work GPS into it soon. “It’s not going to broadcast that to anyone,” Sharon said of Socialight’s foray into geotagging. “It’s just going to show you what’s around you.”

And even if they can handle GPS or the lower-tech triangulation, there’s a good chance many cell phone customers don’t even know about it. “Getting the customer to understand that (GPS) is on their phone has historically been the biggest hurdle,” said telecommunications industry analyst Jeff Kagan. “All these cool technologies are available on the phone but nobody knows it. Customers don’t know it.”

Privacy worries
There’s a bigger issue, though. Beyond any technological challenges, a sizable portion of the population might not like the idea that their locations could be broadcast to others–or logged by their cell phone providers. “There are big privacy concerns,” Poisson said. “Privacy is a huge concern when it comes to location-based services, especially when it comes to mobile devices. Any time that the end user doesn’t have control over who’s knowing where they are, whether it’s another human being that they know or don’t know, or a company that’s collecting that data on an automatic basis, that starts to become problematic.”

And with Yahoo’s just-announced OneConnect launching in a few months–featuring “proximity alerts” when friends also using the service come within a certain distance of one another–it’s clear that the biggest names on the Web see this as a promising market, too.

Mobile networking, at least in the U.S., remains a limited extension of the social-media industry’s biggest PC-based players: lighter, messaging-focused versions of Facebook and MySpace.com, as well as instant-messaging software like Yahoo Messenger and AIM. Social-networking start-ups with a major or exclusive focus on mobile use, like Twitter, have failed to amass a following outside the alpha-geek crowd. For mobile social networking to really take off, it’s going to have to move beyond providing new ways for people to bug their friends with text messages.

“It’s like that old William Gibson cliche that everyone keeps recycling,” said Michael Sharon, co-founder of geographic tagging site Socialight, which has been making small steps toward integrating location awareness into its mobile service. “It’s that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

(Credit:
Marguerite Reardon/CNET Networks)

Recent announcements and developments in the mobile media world have indicated that location-based services are going to be the game-changer. These applications, using GPS technology or cell tower triangulation, are being talked about as the move that will push mobile social networking forward–and with good reason. Crafted correctly, a location-aware mobile service could not only tell you which of your friends are nearby, but also inform you of the nearest place where you could grab a slice of pizza (and whether your neighbors recommend it)–as well as serve up advertisements that give “hyperlocal” a whole new meaning.

Some Facebook users were up in arms over their profile updates being shared on the News Feed and later their third-party shopping activity showing up in Beacon advertisements. What would mobile phone users think if their location were to be broadcast to a big list of social-networking contacts? Such a service would clearly have to be opt-in, which mitigates some of the Big Brother-esque worries but can also slow adoption rates.

A service like Yahoo OneConnect, backed by a well-connected dot-com giant rather than early-stage investor cash, could even the playing field with cross-carrier compatibility, but few details have been released about the product–and a beta test release is months away. It’s a gamble as to which phones and carriers will actually work with it.

Socialight’s Michael Sharon suggested that location-aware social media will have to find some creative new applications so that it’s not just a way to stalk your friends. “I think perhaps one of the reasons they haven’t taken off is because friend-finding is an edge use case,” he said. “It’s the first thing that comes to mind, but it’s perhaps not the most comfortable thing.”

The problem is that small seed investments–on the scale of $500,000 to a few million dollars–don’t fit into venture capitalists’ investment profile when they have hundreds of millions of dollars to invest.

VC firms like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers are adjusting to the need for late-stage capital by setting up funds designed for large investments to scale technology. Hedge funds and private equity are also moving into clean energy, although their appetite for technology risk is typically going to be lower than VCs.

With all the venture capital money going to clean tech, it’s easy to think that it’s the dot-com bubble all over again. There’s certainly a whiff of that gold rush mentality. But the inherent differences between the Internet and the energy business get clearer every week.

Gaps on both ends

I’ve written a few times about the emerging financial models to close the late-stage funding gap in clean tech, sometimes referred to as the “Valley of Death.” That is, the need for lots of money–hundreds of millions of dollars–to commercialize technology on an industrial scale.

Clean-tech VC and blogger Rob Day touched on this end of the funding environment as well this week, pointing to the emergence of “super angels” who can help get those ambitious entrepreneurs out beyond their fledgling stage.

A number of companies are spun out of national labs, yet speakers at clean-tech conferences regularly complain that the funding levels for clean energies are far too low and, perhaps worse, inconsistent.

A piece in Sustainable Industries on Wednesday details how angel investors and state-sponsored clean energy funds are filling the need for seed funding.

There appear to be models evolving for more seed funding as well. That points to the need for a healthy angel investor network as well as state and federal level investments in the clean-energy business.

Entrepreneurs that want to start clean-tech companies from scratch are not being particularly well served by the traditional venture capital funds, a few articles this week argue. It appears that different sources are stepping in to fill the gap, moving under the radar of traditional venture funds.

Consumers and businesses are looking for greener products, from fuel-efficient
cars to clean electricity, but these innovations take years to mature, much longer than it takes to whip up a cool social-networking Web site.

At the state level, there are funds like the Massachusetts Green Energy Fund and the California Clean Energy Fund. Entrepreneurs can also turn to foundations and university-sponsored competitions to get off the ground. But can cash-strapped states adequately prime the pump for clean-energy start-ups?

Today’s installment is the mismatch between venture capital and clean tech–this time, at the small side of the money spectrum.

So as we read the articles about technology advances and claims of breakthroughs, keep in mind, the money–and policies–need to keep pace as well.

Meanwhile, Stacey Higginbotham at BusinessWeek.com on Friday wrote about how venture capitalists are stalking the halls of national research labs because many don’t have the patience for seed funding.

The following products are available:

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Fans of the series may need some time to get used to a few new gameplay features, and the visual presentation does change the overall experience, but underneath still lies the core Madden experience we all love.

After a few games we also noticed that quarterbacks seem a bit too accurate with their deep passes; we felt there needs to be more under and overthrows in the action. On defense, you may find yourself having a tough time penetrating the line without ordering an all-out blitz. Also, we found ourselves dropping way too many seemingly easy interceptions. On a play where such a catch can turn things around, it’s frustrating to see balls like that dropped.

(Credit:
EA)

(Click to read our take on Gameloft’s NFL 2010 for iPhone/iPod Touch).

The start of an NFL season begins with a few things: training camp, weeks of preseason games, and the launch of the yearly Madden. With Madden 10 now out in stores for nearly every system imaginable, we also are presented with the yearly question: is it worth it? After two weeks of playing the final boxed version for the Xbox 360, here’s our final verdict on the only game in town. Or, almost the only game in town: Gameloft’s NFL 2010 for the
iPhone/iPod Touch uses full NFL license and rosters as well.

The after-game broadcast-style highlight segments are well-produced but repetitive. Still, they’re a fun way to follow a franchise mode season from week to week. During the actual season, this will be blast to play as a fantasy alternative to what’s actually going on. But it would still be much nicer if EA simply had a regular-season “this week in the NFL” portal that not only gave info on the current games and stats, but also had replayable best-of plays of the previous week.

Co-op mode is intriguing, but I haven’t spent much time with it. I’ve been taking the Jets through a week-by-week virtual season. I have them at 13-2 heading into their final game against the Bengals (yes, you can laugh at my fantasy, but it’s still my dream), with the Patriots, Steelers, Chargers, Ravens, and Colts also locking up playoff spots, in case you were curious. And no, Chad Pennington did not stay healthy for the 2009 season (although the Dolphins engaged in more annoying wildcat formations that I care to remember).

Yes, there are teams other than the Jets.

(Credit:
EA)

However, it does seem that the game may have gotten an ever-so-slight bump in the speed department. While it is still noticeably slower compared with 09, the gameplay in the final version does seem a bit peppier than what we played at the EA event last month. Like we said, it does add to the overall heightened sense of realism that we imagine some Madden fans may not be used to. Either way, this can be adjusted in the settings.

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Overall, the new Madden has won my heart…and my free time. And while the slower feel still freaks me out a little, I appreciate that it lets the fundamentals of playcalling once again steal the spotlight from button-mashing.

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Scott:
I’ve played this game since 2001 pretty much obsessively, and almost always as the New York Jets. Take that with whatever grain of salt or other spice you like, but at least you now know that I’ve been playing with a handicap. Compared with Madden 09, my first impression a month ago was that the new Madden was slow. Apologies to EA, but it’s better now. While Madden 10 still operates at a less arcade-like speed, the flow of gameplay doesn’t feel as slow-mo as it did in early builds. Maybe I’ve gotten used to it, but the change actually makes passing and running more realistic. Here’s why: passes that are thrown deep will hang, and thus can be more realistically played with the defense. Running plays, on the other hand, focus more on waiting and hitting holes, whereas last year’s version was so fast that gaps would close before you could hit them. The gang-tackling animations and AI are pretty amazing, and really do add some beef to the game–trying to wrangle and break free of tackles with the right analog stick makes you feel more like actual players are up there with arms and legs, instead of programmed bundles of polygons.

Those snags aside, there’s plenty to love in the new Madden. While TV presentation may not be everyone’s preference, the game does a great job at recreating actual drama. Goal line conferences, bringing the chains out, and the like all add to an impressive package. You’re sure to notice a new animation every time you play and the new play-calling screen is the best one in years. Gang tackling is also very satisfying as is the new fumble minigame mechanic.

Gang tackles turn ugly fast.

Jeff:
When Scott and I first played Madden 10 at last month’s EA event in New York, we were convinced that what we saw was a close-to-finished build of the quintessential football sim. Now that we’ve had the final retail version in our hands for a full week, we can safely say that most of our observations remain intact.

(Credit:
EA)

Yet another wildcat formation from the Dolphins…just stop it already!

Company Mike Hess told Greentech Media that its forthcoming spire-shaped Windspire turbine can generate one third of the home’s electricity use.

Southwest Wind Power, which raised a series B round of $6.5 million last year, makes a ground-mounted propeller-type turbine for individual homes or business.

Marquiss Wind Power in January raised a Series A round to build up its square-shaped turbine meant for placement on top of the flat roofs of commercial buildings.

Mariah Power said on Wednesday that it has raised additional funding to bring its small wind turbine to market.

The company said it has secured $500,000 in funding from venture capital firm Big Sky Partners. As part of the investment, Michael Schwab of Big Sky Partners will join Mariah Power’s board.

Mariah Power, based in Reno, Nev., makes a ground-mounted vertical-axis wind turbine that is designed for people’s homes or businesses. It’s expected to be available later this month for about $4,000.

The business of building wind farms with giant turbines is booming. But the world of small wind is getting more attention.

(Credit:
Mariah Power)